>Get BJ on prom night
>Week later massive red spot on cock
>Herpes
>Fuck
>doctor say this shit is
uncurable
>No woman will want me
>Struggle with shame and depression
>Lose all interest in sex
>Go years without being with a woman
>Finally regain some self confidence
>Brainwave.exe
>Need woman who already has the disease
>Find old hooker on craigslist
>Looks pretty ragged on the blurred photo
>Has probably had a million diseased cocks in her
>Call her up
>Explain I have herpes
>Tell her I presume she has it too
>Silence
>Then she hangs up
I dont know where to go from here bros
Literally ⅔ of all humanity has at least one type of HSV. It is not the end of the world.
is it? i honestly have no idea?
what are the implications on quality of life of various STDs? how “bad” is it to catch herpes? is it even worth avoiding it? (as i read somewhere that most people catch it eventually anyways.)
There’s two variants. One is extremely harmless and is generally oral. This is the one that nearly everyone has and no one really notices. The other variant is generally genital (though either one can be in either place) and is more severe and less common. The first outbreak can be really bad, subsequent ones less so. An estimated 1 in 10 adults in the US have it, though I’d imagine it skews a lot more towards highly sexually active communities. It can be transmitted even if you don’t actively have sores, though that’s much rather. Condoms also don’t prevent transmission, though again they make it much more unlikely. While getting it certainly doesn’t have to be the end of the world it is worse than they generally say.
Here’s the really fun part of the above stat: the majority of those cases are spread via family members kissing.
Hey, it’s 1 in 10 for the genital version in the U.S. Not common. When someone dismissively says “oh it’s not that bad, it’s not the end of the world”, they’re not the ones who had to deal with pain of taking shits with sores in their ass. To deal with having a hard time being able to tell the difference between gas, liquid, and solids knocking at the door while on stool softeners to help make shits less painful. They’re not the ones who have to have the downright humiliating “oh by the way I have herpes, are you ok with that” talk. (They never are).The fact is, it’s debilitated me mentally and physically. The scarring from it has taken all the pleasure away from anal for me, and it still hurts to shit half the time. Don’t treat it so fucking lightly.
i’m sorry that you’ve had that experience and i don’t mean to diminish what you’re don’t through, but it’s also very important to note that this is far from the normal for the very large majority of people
fear doesn’t help sexual health… all sex comes with risks, and unprotected sex comes with significantly increased risk but the reality is by and large this is not what HSV looks like without other factors effecting it
downplaying risks is bad, but equally bad is people thinking a condition is worse than it is. this leads to more risky behaviour, because if they get the “scary” thing and it’s not as bad as they expect, they can take risky behaviour because they discount all their other education
it also only reinforces stigmas. this is particularly common with HIV-positive people: these days, if you have an undetectable viral load (if you take your daily medications) you can not pass on HIV… however the stigma remains, and people still often choose to not have sex with someone with an undetectable HIV infection (again, undetectable IS UNTRANSMITTABLE)
muddying the waters is very bad at scale
calm, unbiased information is what is required for public health. individual anecdotes about worst case scenarios do not serve to make people’s lives better
Telling people it’s no big deal is doing them a direct misservice. By all means it should be destimized but you should also be honest about the risks and realities of what it can mean. What happened to me might be a worse case scenario but the average first breakout is still way worse than you would have people believe, and people should know what can actually happen. I’m so sick of people being dismissive of it.
Half the time when I’m confiding in a friend about how my life has and is still going downhill and I tell them about the herpes the first words out of their mouth is “it’s no big deal, everyone has it” and it makes me feel so alone. It can be a big deal and it’s not as common as people make out.
1/3 club 😎🤏
And it’s not infectious when it’s asymptomatic.
And it’s asymptomatic most of the time. 😚
Tell me you have herpes without saying you have herpes.
1/3 gang represent. Passed midlife, still clean. I didn’t find my penis in the trash bin.
but have you looked behind the couch?
Where can I find more info on this? You’ve peaked my curiosity and I want to learn more about HSV and how it works.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/pique-vs-peak-vs-peek
Nah, OP has reached peak curiosity, it’s all downhill from here.
i choose this explanation. nothing is or will be as interesting as this question I asked at 3am
It works by making fucking ugly sore blisters on/around my mouth a couple times a year. they dry out and crust off after a week or so and i get on with my life.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/herpes-simplex-virus
Huh, either I dont know I have it or I got lucky. Thats crazy. I imagine an STD test would pick up HSV-2 but I wonder if it also picks up the oral variant. Ive never actually noticed any symptoms on myself. This is actually crazy though I didnt know this, I feel like more people should. TIL lol
No one tests for HSV1 ever unless you have a bad active outbreak.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK47447/
2/3 of the population UNDER 50 have some form of HSV, but virtually every person autopsied that died over the age of 60 will have HSV-1. It’s THAT common. That’s why they don’t test.
I got tested once and the doctor told me testing for herpes is pointless because most everyone has the antibodies in their body due to how common it is. The test gives false positives most of the time.
You can totally also be asymptomatic for your whole life and not know it. It is also useful to know that “oral herpes” doesn’t exclusively affect your mouth, and “genital herpes” doesn’t exclusively affect your genitals. Just more often. Both types can appear in both locations. The hypothetical person from the greentext would likely have contracted oral herpes. I’m not sure how that works with STD tests, though.
In my experience most standard STD panels will test for HSV-2 but not 1, usually you’d have to special request it
a full STI screen is for HIV, syphilis, chlamydia, and gonorrhoea
blood test - for syphilis, HIV throat swab - for chlamydia and gonorrhoea anal swab - for chlamydia and gonorrhoea urine - for chlamydia and gonorrhoea
afaik they sometimes tack on general biochemistry (sodium, potassium, etc) to the blood test, as well as some other things like mycoplasma genitalium but these are not standard 3-monthly tests
afaik it’s very rare to test for HSV at all, for various reasons
And even when you ask about it, your doc will probably say that the test isn’t worth doing because of how common HSV is and how inaccurate the test is.
The important and nastiest part of HSV is some strains cause cervical cancer in women, so men with HSV must take care not to spread something that has the potential to kill their partner. There is a vaccine, but it doesn’t work 100%.
the vaccine is very effective, and also that’s HPV
Are you sure that you don’t mean HPV?
Indeed, the cancer thing applies to women with HPV, a virus that most people have also been affected with (though the vast majority of cases do not lead to cancer which still leaves tens of million of women at risk).
Men can get cancers from HPV too, it’s a good idea for everyone to get vaccinated.
And even without the risk of cancer you still just lower the risk for any warts appearing
Or spreading it to others.
Well, yeah, I seem to mess them up - HPV is the one with vaccine, HPS is similar in that it can be a cause of cervical cancer, but the matter is less researched and I don’t know about a vaccine.
Nah, cervical cancer is down to such an extent in the vaccinated cohorts that we can confidently say that it was the HPV causing it. Those vaccinations have been a massive, massive success. Much more than expected by public health scientists.
Also throat cancer in men.
You are both talking about HPV, not HSV.
Yep, sorry, they can both cause cancer, but HPV is the one people can get vaccinated against.
That’s like saying blood out of your ass happens to everyone when most cases are just hemorrhoids and some are cancer.